36.5 Planning GroupWise Resource Groups

Resource groups ensure that resources that depend on each other fail over together. If your GroupWise system is very small (for example, one domain and one post office), you could have a single GroupWise resource group so that your whole GroupWise system would fail over together. More typically, multiple domains and post offices are located throughout your organization, so you would set up a resource group for each domain and post office.

A resource group for a domain or post office must include the following types of resources:

Network Name:
The virtual name by which the domain or post office resource group will be known on the network, regardless of which node it is active on

IP Address:
The virtual IP address that will be associated with the network name, regardless of which node the domain or post office resource group is active on

Physical Disk:
The drive letter where the domain or post office directory will be located, used when mapping a drive to the physical disk

File Share:
The name of the physical disk, used when mapping a drive to the physical disk

Generic Service:
The GroupWise agent, running as a Windows service, that will service the domain or post office

For convenience, you might want to name each resource group after the domain or post office it represents. In this documentation, a resource group that could include a domain, a post office, or both, is termed a “GroupWise resource group.”

Each GroupWise resource group has associated with it a list of possible owners. The possible owners are the nodes to which the resource group could fail over. By default, a resource group is configured to have all nodes in the cluster in its possible owners list, organized in ascending alphanumeric order. Only one node at a time can have a particular GroupWise resource group active. If a resource group’s current owner node fails, the resource group fails over to the next node in the possible owners list. You should customize the owners list for each GroupWise resource group based on the fan-out-failover principle.

When a node fails, its resource groups should not all fail over together to the same node in the cluster. Instead, the resource groups should be distributed across multiple nodes throughout the cluster. This prevents any one node from shouldering the entire processing load typically carried by another node. In addition, some GroupWise resource groups should never have the potential of failing over to the same node. For example, a post office and POA that service a large number of very active GroupWise client users should never fail over to a node where another very large post office and heavily loaded POA reside. If they did, users on both post offices would notice a decrease in responsiveness of the GroupWise client.

IMPORTANT:If you are planning more than one Internet Agent or WebAccess Agent in the cluster, you must ensure that they can never fail over to the same node at the same time. You cannot customize the Windows service names for the Internet Agent or the WebAccess Agent. Therefore, only one of each can run on a server. The Windows service names for POAs and MTAs include the name of the post office or domain that they service, so this limitation does not apply to POAs and MTAs.

SYSTEM CLUSTERING WORKSHEET

Under Item 4: Resource Group for Domain, specify the network name and other required information for the domain resource group. Mark whether you will place the post office in the same resource group with the domain.

If you want the post office in a different resource group from where the domain is located, under Item 5: Resource Group for Post Office, specify the network name and other required information for the post office resource group.